


All That's Left is a Ghost of You

by waltzmatildah



Category: Chicago Fire
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-04
Updated: 2012-11-04
Packaged: 2017-11-17 23:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/554257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Follows the aftermath of the opening scenes in the pilot episode and explores how Leslie comes to be supplying Kelly with narcotics…<br/>________________</p><p> <i>If there’s a dare hidden in his actions then it fails; she knows him much too well to fall for that.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	All That's Left is a Ghost of You

  
_the screams all sound the same_

 

\---

By the time Leslie’s shift finishes, Kelly is nowhere in sight. The station, still in a state of semi-contained chaos following Darden’s death earlier that night, is eerily quiet and, despite leaving him several text messages of varying desperation, she’s not seen Kelly since he called a flippant good-bye to her over his shoulder and around a mouthful of half-chewed apple on his way to work.

Her fingers drum rhythmically against the steering wheel and she guns the engine of her car in anticipation of the red light finally changing to green in front of her. The song on the radio switches from something she’d barely registered, to loud, angry hip hop, and she jabs at the off button wildly in a bid to shut it up. Struggling to swallow down the inexplicable panic that’s rising with every passing minute, she starts compiling a pre-emptive list of places she’ll search if he’s not home when she gets there. 

But his car’s parked out front as she cuts the corner roughly with her own and swings into their street, and while that’s not necessarily confirmation that he’s home, it does at least give her the opportunity to _breathe_ and to _think_ before she goes crashing into the apartment.

 

 

 

She opens the door to darkness, and the moment of relief she’d experienced at the sight of his parked car blinks out, replaced almost immediately by that familiar bubble of panicked worry.

Then; shuffled movement registers at the same time she flicks the lights on, and she sees him flinch visibly against the sudden bright before schooling his features into the easy indifference she’s so used to. There’s a bottle of liquor in his right hand, dangling, and his left is crossed over his chest, fingers kneading the flesh at the base of his neck. He brings the bottle to his lips loosely, smirks them around the rim with a raise of his eyebrows in her direction before swallowing.

If there’s a dare hidden in his actions then it fails; she knows him much too well to fall for that.

“Kelly.”

He falters. And she knew it was coming with a certainty that makes her feel ill.

The bottle drops, the dull crash of thick glass on floorboards reverberates inside her skull and she lowers her gaze from his, uses the expanding river of scotch at his feet as a smokescreen to give him time…

There is not enough time in the world for this.

 

 

 

His left hand is still crossed over his chest, fingers working viciously along the slope of his right shoulder as he blinks and breathes and does his best not to fall apart while she’s watching him. He’s changed into sweatpants she notes, nothing else, and she can smell the acrid tang of stale smoke still etched into his skin from where she stands.

“Are you okay?” she asks quietly; tentative and already prepared for the lie he’s surely concocting.

A nod before: “I’m fine.”

Right on cue, his voice rumbles; thick. Like gravel beneath her feet.

“Kelly-”

The rebuttal in her tone is clear, but he cuts her off; sharp, eyes narrowed, desperate.

“Don’t.”

“At least let--”

He steps back as she speaks, collides lightly with the wall at his back and goes rigid; like maybe she’s got him trapped there.

She raises her hands, palms out; a momentary capitulation of sorts without the promise of actual surrender. 

 

 

 

She gives him half an hour; she gives _herself_ half an hour. Uses the time in between to shower and reply to the stream of steady text messages Gabby has sent since they parted ways at the station. 

_Are you home yet? Is Kelly there? Is he okay?_  
 _Wednesdays suck actual ass. Fact._  
 _If you need me, let me know._  
 _I honestly mean that last one. Anything. You or Kelly. Just say the word._

She taps back a quick, _Everything’s okay… I think. I’ll keep you posted…_ before tossing the phone onto the centre of her bed and dragging her hands across her face.

Prepares as best she can for what round two might deliver.

 

 

 

The first thing she notes as she drops down the last couple of stairs and back into the living room is that he’s still fiddling with his shoulder. And the confirmation that he’s obviously injured gives her just the kind of scaffold she needs to build her offer of unconditional support around.

Broken bones she knows. She can fix broken bones. 

Broken hearts are a whole different ball-game.

 

 

 

She walks past him without comment, makes her way into the kitchen without seeking so much as eye contact and snags an ice-pack out of the freezer, two beers from the fridge beside it. The soles of her feet slapping against the cool floor, and the closing of the fridge door, the only sounds that register as she makes her way back to where he’s now moved to seated on the couch, staring blindly at the television that he’s not bothered to switch on.

Her knees press against the outer edge of his thigh as she sits; the contact, deliberate. She sets the beers on the coffee table, leaves them un-opened as she sifts rapidly through her catalogue of consonants and vowels in an attempt to come up with the just the right combination of words to say to him.

She settles on a semi-comfortable silence in the end. There are no right words to say for this after all…

 

 

 

His fingers freeze as she raises her own, and he twists to look from her to them, frown firmly in place, like maybe he’s only just now figured out what he’s been doing.

She lets her palms hover just above his shoulder for a beat, gives him a moment to process whatever realisations he needs to come to before dropping her fingers down that last inch to meet his. There’s a period of hesitation, she can sense the fierce desire to hold onto his earlier claim of being _fine_ as it strains against all the mounting evidence to the contrary. Then, his hand slides out from beneath hers suddenly, lands in his lap and doesn’t so much as twitch.

“Do you remember what happened?” she asks cautiously, and the clamping of his eyelids and locking of his jaw is the only answer she gets in response.

That it means _yes, yes I do, I remember everything…_ is obvious; that he's not yet ready to say the words out loud, equally so. 

She doesn’t push. Experience tells her she’ll get nowhere fast.

 

 

 

She examines his shoulder as thoroughly as she can with what she’s got, which means her attempt is cursory at best. The muscles are tight with tension, but it’s impossible to prise apart the separation of injury and devastation at this point and so she’s as uncertain by the end as she had been at the very start. He moves his fingers and drops his chin and rotates his shoulder on command, and despite his earlier discomfort doesn’t even flinch beneath her ministrations. 

She thinks, certain, that the damage could range from bruising to ligament damage to broken bones and his reaction would still look exactly the same, a disconcerting combination of silence and dissociation. 

 

 

 

She exhales softly and drops a quick kiss onto the curve of his shoulder, and he turns at that; raises his eyebrows in something akin to disbelief that has her grinning, victorious.

“What?” she asks, schooling her features into the picture of faux-innocence as she wraps the ice-pack in a discarded t-shirt and settles it lightly into place.

“Is that how you and Dawson treat all your patients? By kissing them better?”

She shrugs, happy that the detached stare he’d adopted seems to have lifted; a momentary reprieve. 

“What happens behind closed ambulance doors, _stays_ behind closed ambulance doors,” she says with a wink as she leans forward and grabs one of the beers she’d collected earlier. Without opening it, she holds the bottle out towards him.

“Painkillers _or_ beer, not both. Your choice.”

He smirks and huffs out an exasperated sigh before snatching the beer from her grasp and twisting the top off with his teeth in the exact manner she’s forever chiding him over.

She opens her own mouth to protest and gets a bottle-top in her lap for her troubles. Settles, instead, for snagging a beer for herself and pushing back onto the couch next to him, letting her head fall to his chest as her own exhaustion announces its presence, loud and clear.

 

 

 

She replaces the ice-pack several times over the next hour and a half as they pretend to watch a basketball game and pick half-heartedly at bowls of cereal they’ve settled on in lieu of the proper dinner they should have had hours ago. When she realises they’re halfway through a _Seinfeld_ re-run and she can’t for the life of her remember who won the earlier game, she decides to call it a night; to finally give up on today and hope to _god_ that tomorrow is better.

Or, at least, that it’s bearable.

As he stands to follow her she watches his movements through elongated shadows and her own lowered lashes. His face twists fleetingly with barely concealed agony, and as he clenches and unclenches his fist several times, she weighs up encouraging him to get it seen to properly versus the likelihood that anything she says will only make him even more determined to push through it. 

Even more determined to latch hold of the pain like it’s nothing but deserved punishment for some personal kind of failing he’s no doubt convinced himself caused his best friend’s death.

“Kelly?”

He looks up only somewhat reluctantly, eyes bright in the low light, blinking.

The words disappear then, and she crosses the room towards him with a series of off-kilter steps before wrapping her arms around his middle, tight. She can feel his breath, hot and uneven against the top of her head, as he folds so completely into her wordless offer of comfort.

 

 

 

 

She hears him leave before she’s even out of bed the next morning.

She is nowhere near naïve enough to waste time hoping that he’s taken himself off for x-rays or anything else that could be considered sensible. 

 

 

 

And suddenly then, it’s eleven days later and there’s been an official inquiry to sit through and a funeral she could barely bring herself to attend and too much hard liquor wrapped around not nearly enough sleep. He’s in front of her, rigid with pain, jaw locked and eyes wide.

_Pleading._

“Please, Shay…”

To turn him down would mean to admit she hasn’t been paying attention.

And she finds that handing over the vial of narcotics is less exhausting than the myriad other possible responses she has available to her.

Self-recrimination included.

 

 

 

 

She makes a deliberate effort after that. Kicks him off the couch later that night and onto pillows on the floor, drags his t-shirt over his head despite his protests, and does what she can with half an hour of free time before bed and a bottle of massage oil.

If the problem is anywhere near as severe as she thinks it might be, and she’s seen the looks, the way his shoulder will catch with even the smallest of movements, the sudden loss of strength, the instant agony that comes with it, then she knows what she has to offer will do very little to help.

But she’s not the one that needs convincing…

 

 

 

_“How’s your arm today?”  
“Fine.”_

 

 

 

It’s a routine they’ll come to perfect.


End file.
